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#asknostr what will miners be rewarded with when all the #bitcoin has been mined.

First, that's not going to be for quite some time. The last sats won't be mined for over 100 years.

That said, it is hard to imagine the value of the new Bitcoin mined being enough to justify a lot more hashrate coming online over time. Then again, folks in the early days probably never would have imagined 3.125 Bitcoin would be worth almost $350k, either.

For the entirety of Bitcoin's history so far, even though the subsidy has been chopped in half every 4 years, it has ended up being worth more than the previous total subsidy. Diminishing returns suggests that this might not always be the case, but that's why there are transaction fees.

The assumption, and I think it is a fair one, is that block-space will be scarce, with high demand for it in the future due to growing adoption. Yes. A lot of transacting will move off-chain. It has to if we want that many people to be able to use Bitcoin. However, there will still be a portion of transactions that must settle to the chain, and I would wager it will be more than enough to sustain miners.

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Discussion

Ashr 7mo ago

I gotcha, I guess we better make sure these mining pools stay profitable. I'm not sure how long the owners would like running their facility at a loss. If that does become the case it also becomes a paradox, the one thing that is insuring their wealth is also eating away at it.

Dikaios1517 7mo ago

Pools will always be profitable. They just charge a fee to miners for their services.

Miners themselves operate on thin margins. Sometimes they are profitable, sometimes they aren't. Miners come and go in Bitcoin based on who can stick it out, whether they can find stranded energy, and how well they run their operations. Plenty of mining companies have gone under in the past and plenty more will go under in the future, yet overall network hashrate keeps climbing.